Unbounding the Future:
the Nanotechnology Revolution

Chapter 8

Providing the Basics, and
More

The hungry, the homeless, and the hunted have
little time or energy to devote to human relations or personal
development. Food, shelter, and security are not everything, but
they are basic. Material abundance is perhaps the best known way
to build a contempt for material things and a concern for what
lies beyond. In that spirit, let us take a further look at
providing heaps of basic material wealth where today there is
poverty.

The idea of bringing everyone in the world up to
a decent standard of living looks utopian today. The world's poor
are numerous and the wealthy are few, and yet the Earth's
resources are already strained by our crude industrial and
agricultural technologies. For the 1970s and 1980s, with a
growing awareness of the environmental impact of human population
and pollution, many people have begun to wrestle with the specter
of declining wealth. Few have allowed themselves to consider what
it might be like to live in a world with far greater material
wealth because it has seemed impossible. Any discussion of such
things will inevitably have a whiff of the 1950s or 1960s about
it: Gee whiz, we can have supercars and Better Living Through (a
substitute for conventional) Chemistry!

In the long run, unless population growth is
limited, it will be impossible to maintain a decent standard of
living for everyone. This is a basic fact, and to ignore it would
be to destroy our future. Yet within sight is a time in which the
world's poorest can be raised to a material standard of living
that would be the envy of the world's richest today. The key is
efficient, low-cost production of high-quality goods. Whether
this will be used to achieve the goals we describe is more than
just a question of technology.

Here, as in the next two chapters, we continue to
focus on how the new technologies can serve positive goals. There
is a lot to say, and it needs to be said, in part because
positive goals can in some measure displace negative goals. We
ask patience of those readers bothered by what may seem an
optimistic tone, and ask that they imagine the authors to share
their fears that powerful technologies will be abused, that
positive goals may end in ruin, that a material paradise may yet
harbor human misery. Chapters 11 and 12 will discuss limits, accidents, and
abuse.

Third World Nanotechnology

Where wealth is concerned, the least developed
countries present the hardest case. Can a capability as advanced
as nanotechnology,
based on molecular
machinery, be of use in the Third World? The answer must be
yes. Agriculture is the backbone of Third World economies today,
and agriculture is based on the naturally occurring molecular
machines in wheat, rice, yams, and the like.

The Third World is short on equipment and skills.
(It often has governmental problems as well, but that is another
story.) Molecular
manufacturing can make equipment inexpensive enough for the
poor to buy or for aid agencies to give away. This includes
equipment for making more equipment, so dependency could be
reduced. As for skills, basic molecular manufacturing will
require little labor of any kind, and a little skill will go a
long way. As the technology advances, more and more of the
products can be easy-to-use smart materials.

Molecular manufacturing will enable the poorest
countries to bypass the difficult and dirty process of the
industrial revolution. It can make products that are less
expensive and easier to use than yams or rice or goats or water
buffalo. And with products like cheap supercomputers with huge
databases of writing and animation viewed through 3-D color
displays, it can even help spread knowledge.

Nanotechnology's role in helping the poorest
nations won't be on the minds of the first
developersthey'll be in government and commercial labs in
the wealthiest nations, pursuing problems of concern to people
there. History, though, is full of unintended consequences, and
some are for the better.

Construction and Housing

Building large objects is basic to solving
problems of housing and transportation. Smart materials can help.

Today, buildings are expensive to construct,
expensive to replace, and expensive to make fireproof,
tornado-proof, earthquake-proof, and so forth. Making buildings
tall is expensive; making walls soundproof is expensive; building
underground is expensive. Efforts to relieve city congestion
often founder on the high cost of building subways, which can
amount to hundreds of millions of dollars per mile.

Building codes and politics permitting,
nanotechnology will make possible revolutions in the construction
of buildings. Superior materials will make it easy to construct
tall (or deep) buildings to free up land, and strong buildings
that can ride out the greatest earthquake without harm. Buildings
can be made so energy-efficient and so good at using the solar
energy falling on them that most are net energy producers. What
is more, smart materials can make it easy to build and modify
complex structures, such as walls full of windows, wiring,
plumbing, data networks, and the like. For a concrete example
that shows the principle, let's picture what smart pipes could be
like.

Let's say that you want to install a
fold-down sink in the corner of your bedroom. The new
materials make fold-down sinks practical, and in a house made
of advanced smart materials, just sticking one on the wall
would be enoughthe plumbing would rearrange itself. But
this is an old, pre-breakthrough house, so the sink is a
retrofit. To do this home-handiwork project, you buy several
boxes full of inexpensive tubing, T-joints, valves, and
fixtures in a variety of sizes, all as light as wood veneer
and feeling like soft rubber.

The biggest practical problem will be to make
a hole from an existing water pipe and drainpipe to where you
want the sink. Molecular manufacturing can provide excellent
power tools to make the holes, and smart paint and plaster to
cover them again, but the details depend on how your house is
built.

The smart plumbing system does help, of
course. If you want to run the drain line through the attic,
built-in pumps will make sure that the water flows properly.
The flexibility of the pipes makes it much easier to run them
around curves and corners. Low-cost power makes it practical
for the sink to have a flow-through water heater, so you only
need to run a cold-water pipe to have both hot and cold
water. All the parts go together as easily as a child's
blocks, and seem about as flimsy and likely to leak. When you
turn it on, though, the microscopic components of the pipes
lock together and become as strong as steel. And smart
plumbing doesn't leak.

If your house were made of smart materials,
like most of the housing in the Third World these days, life
would have been easier. Using a special trowel, wall
structures would be reworked like soft clay, doing their
structural job all the while. Setting up a plumbing system
from scratch with this stuff is easy, and hard to do wrong.
Drinking water pipes won't connect to wastewater pipes, so
drinking water can't be accidentally contaminated. Drains
won't clog, because they can clean themselves better than a
rotary steel blade ever could. If you run enough pipes from
everything to everything else, built-in pumps will make sure
that water flows in the right direction with adequate
pressure.

Smart plumbing is one example of a general
pattern. Molecular manufacturing can eventually make complex
products at low cost, and those complex products can be simpler
to use than anything we have today, freeing our attention for
other concerns. Buildings can become easy to make and easy to
change. The basic conveniences of the modern world, and more, can
be carried to the ends of the earth and installed by the people
there to suit their tastes.

Food

Worldwide food production has been outpacing
population growth, yet hunger continues. In recent years, famine
has often had political roots, as in Ethiopia where the rulers
aim to starve opponents into submission. Such problems are beyond
a simple technological solution. To avoid getting headaches,
we'll also ignore the politics of farm price-support programs,
which raise food prices while people are going hungry. All we can
suggest here is a way to provide fresh food at lower cost with
reduced environmental impact.

For decades, futurists have predicted the coming
of synthetic foods. Some sort of molecular-manufacturing process
could doubtless make such things with the usual low costs, but
this doesn't sound appetizing, so we'll ignore the idea.

Most agriculture today is inefficientan
environmental disaster. Modern agriculture is famed for wasting
water and polluting it with synthetic fertilizers, and for
spreading herbicides and pesticides over the landscape. Yet the
greatest environmental impact of agriculture is its sheer
consumption of land. In the American East, ancient forests
disappeared under the ax, in part to supply wood, in part to
clear land. The prairies of the West disappeared under the plow.
Around the world, this trend continues. The technology of the ax,
the fire, and the plow is chiefly responsible for the destruction
of rain forests today. A growing population will tend to turn
every productive ecosystem into some sort of farmland or grazing
land, if we let it.

No technological fix can solve the long-term
problem of population growth. Nonetheless, we can roll back the
problem of the loss of land, yet increase food supplies. One
approach is intensive greenhouse agriculture.

Every kind of plant has its optimum growing
conditions, and those conditions are far different from those
found in most farmland during most of the year. Plants growing
outdoors face insect pests, unless doused with pesticide, and low
levels of nutrients, unless doused with fertilizer. In
greenhouses patrolled by "nanoflyswatters" able to
eliminate invading insects, plants would be protected from pests
and could be provided with nutrients without contaminating
groundwater or runoff. Most plants prefer higher humidity than
most climates provide. Most plants prefer higher, more uniform
temperatures than are typically found outdoors. What is more,
plants thrive in high levels of carbon dioxide. Only greenhouses
can provide pest protection, ample nutrients, humidity, warmth,
and carbon dioxide all together and without reengineering the
Earth.

Taken together, these factors make a huge
difference in agricultural productivity. Experiments with
intensive greenhouse agriculture, performed by the Environmental
Research Lab in Arizona, show that an area of 250 square
metersabout the size of a tennis courtcan raise
enough food for a person, year in and year out. With molecular
manufacturing to make inexpensive, reliable equipment, the
intensive labor of intensive agriculture can be automated. With
technology like the deployable "tents" and smart
materials we have described, greenhouse construction can be
inexpensive. Following the standard argument, with equipment
costs, labor costs, materials costs, and so forth, all expected
to be low, greenhouse-grown foods can be inexpensive.

What does this mean for the environment? It means
that the human race could feed itself with ordinary, naturally
grown, pesticide-free foods while returning more than 90 percent
of today's agricultural land to wilds. With a generous five
hundred square meters per person, the U.S. population would
require only 3 percent of present U.S. farm acreage, freeing 97
percent for other uses, or for a gradual return to wilderness.
When farmers are able to grow high-quality foodstuffs
inexpensively, in a fraction of the room that they require today,
they will find more demand for their land to be tended as a park
or wilderness than as a cornfield. Farm journals can be expected
to carry articles advising on techniques for rapid and esthetic
restoration of forest and grassland, and on how best to
accommodate the desires of the discriminating nature lover and
conservationist. Even "unpopular" land will tend to
become popular with people seeking solitude.

The economics of assembler-based manufacturing
will remove the incentive to make greenhouses cheap, ugly, and
boxy; the only reason to build that way today is the high cost of
building anything at all. And while today's greenhouses suffer
from viral and fungal infestations, these could be eradicated
from plants in the same way they would be from the human body, as
will be described later. A problem faced by today's
greenhousesoverheatingcould be dealt with by using
heat exchangers, thereby conserving the carefully balanced inside
atmosphere. Finally, if it should turn out that a little bit of
bad weather improves the taste of tomatoes, that, too, could be
provided, since there would be no reason to be fanatical about
sheer efficiency.

Communications

Today, telecommunications systems have sharply
limited capacity and are expensive to expand. Molecular
manufacturing will drop the price of the "boxes" in
telecommunications systemsthings such as switching systems,
computers, telephones, and even the fabled videophone. Cables
made of smart materials can make these devices easy to install
and easy to connect together.

Regulatory agencies willing, you might someday be
able to buy inexpensive spools of material resembling kite
string, and other spools of material resembling tape, then use
them to join a world data network. Either kind of strand can
configure its core into a good-quality optical fiber, with
special provisions for going around bends. When rubbed together,
pieces of string will fuse together, or fuse to a piece of tape.
Pieces of tape do likewise. To hook up to the network, you run
string or tape from your telephone or other data terminal to the
nearest point that is already connected. If you live deep in a
tropical rain forest, run a string to the village satellite link.

These data-cable materials include amplifiers, nanocomputers, switching
nodes, and the rest, and they come loaded with software that
"knows" how to act to transmit data reliably. If you're
worried that a line may break, run three in different directions.
Even one line could carry far more data than all the channels in
a television cable put together.

Transportation

Getting around quickly requires vehicles and
somewhere for them to travel. The old 1950s vision of private
helicopters would be technically possible with inexpensive,
high-quality manufacturing, cheap energy, and a bit of
improvement in autopilots and air-traffic controlbut will
people really tolerate that much junk roaring across the sky?
Fortunately, there is an alternative both to this and to building
ever more roads.

Going Underground

Near the surface of the Earth, there is as much
room underground as there is above it. This is usually ignored,
because the room is full of dirt, rock, pressurized water, and
the like. Digging is expensive. Digging long, deep tunnels is
even more expensive. This expense, however, is mostly in the cost
of equipment, materials, and energy. Tunneling machines are in
wide use today, and molecular manufacturing can make them more
efficient and less expensive. The energy to operate them will be
no great problem, and smart materials can line tunnels as fast as
they are dug, with little or no labor. Nanotechnology will open
the low frontier.

With a little care, the environmental impact of a
deep tunnel can be trivial. Instead of solid rock far below the
surface, there is rock with a sealed tunnel running through it.
Nothing nearby need be disturbed.

Tunnels avoid both the aesthetic impact of a sky
full of noisy aircraft and the environmental impact of paving
strips of landscape. This will make them less expensive than
roads, and they can, if desired, be more common than roads in the
developed world today. They will even permit faster
transportation.

Taking the Subway

Japan and Germany are actively developing
magnetic trains, like those in the Desert Rose scenario. These
avoid the limitations of steel wheels on steel rails by using
magnetic forces to "fly" the train along a special
track. Magnetic trains can reach aircraft speeds at ground level.
On long runs through evacuated tunnels, they can reach spacecraft
speeds, traveling global distances in an hour or so (less, if
passengers are willing to tolerate substantial acceleration).

Systems like this can give "taking the
subway" a new meaning. Local transportation would be at fast
automotive speeds, but long-distance transportation would be
faster than the Concorde. With superconducting electrical
systems, fast subways would be more energy efficient than today's
slow mass transit.

Getting Your Car

For decades, people have proposed replacing
automobiles with some form of mass-transportation system, and it
seems that cost revolutions (including inexpensive tunneling) may
finally make this practical. Before junking the car, though, it's
worth seeing how it might be improved.

Molecular manufacturing can make almost anything
better. Automobiles can be made stronger and safer, lighter,
higher performance, and higher efficiency, while getting
excellent mileage and burning clean, inexpensive fuels, perhaps
in fuel cells powering quiet electric motors. Using aerodynamic
forces to hold the car to the road, there's no reason why a
comfortable passenger car shouldn't be able to deliver
uncomfortable, drag-racer acceleration.

To imagine a cheap car built with molecular
manufacturing, first imagine loading it with all the attractive
features that you've ever heard proposed. This includes
everything from today's self-adjusting seats and mirrors,
excellent sound systems, and specially tuned steering and
suspension systems, through automated navigation displays,
emergency braking, and reliable super-duper airbags. Now, instead
of just having the position of the seats, mirrors, and so forth
adjust to a driver, as some cars do today, our smart-material car
can also adjust its size, shape, and color, facing owners with
choices such as, "What should our car look like for this
occasion?"

Those seeking an image of solid conservatism and
wealth won't drive such cheap cars; they will risk their necks in
a certified antique car, made from the traditional steel, paint,
and rubber. If environmental regulations permit it, the car might
even have a genuine gasoline-burning engine. The latter can no
doubt be cleaned up by fancy nanotechnology-based
emission-control systems.

Opening the Space Frontier

Our transportion system today effectively ends in
the upper atmosphere. Travel beyond still takes the form of
"historic missions." There is no reason for this
situation to continue for long, once molecular manufacturing
becomes well established.

The cost of spaceflight is high because
spacecraft are huge, fragile things, made in such small numbers
that they're almost hand-crafted. Molecular manufacturing will
replace today's delicate monsters with rugged, mass-produced
vehicles (which, with greater efficiency, needn't be so large).
The vehicles will cost little, but the energy? Today, the energy
cost of a ticket to orbit in an efficient vehicle would be less
than one hundred dollars. Low cost vehicles and energy will drop
the total cost to a fraction of this.

We will know that spaceflight has become
inexpensive when people see the Earth as just a small part of the
world, and understand in their bones that space resources make
continued exploitation of Earth's resources unnecessary. In the
long run, efficient, clean, low-cost manufacturing can transform
the way human beings affect the Earth by their presence. Even
stay-at-home humans will be better able to heal the damage they
have done.